Welcome back. Thanks again for being here.

What are you?

What are you going to be here?

Woodrow Wilson was in here.

Woodrow Wilson was the only US president who had a PhD in political science.

He came to office having thought more about how a government functions and how you should run it, then most people before him or since.

One of Wilson's big complaints was that too many people in government held the belief that a government was a big machine.

What he meant by that was the belief that once you set up a series of rules,

you could take your hands off the wheel, so to speak, and let the government run on its own forever.

Too many people, he said, viewed the government like it was physics,

with a set of laws that required no updating or second guessing because they were believed

to be precise and perfect as they were.

Wilson, again, he thought that was all wrong. He wrote in 1908 that quote,

The trouble with this theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls not under the theory of the

universe but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated

by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.

I always thought, look I'm honestly not interested in politics, but the phrase it is

accountable to Darwin and not to Newton.

The first time I heard that I thought that is so brilliant, so ingenious.

And of course what he's getting at here is that things that are accountable to Darwin, Charles Darwin,

evolve. They change, they adapt to their environment, to their circumstances.

Whereas things that are accountable to Newton, Isaac Newton, like Newton in physics, are very precise.

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